


Why Should They Know Their Fate

by Bibliotheksbewohnerin



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Abduction, Book 4: Broken Homes, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I might have gotten some of the magic wrong for which I apologise, Injury, Major Character Injury, Spoilers for Broken Homes, Torture, aftermath of broken homes, maybe some slight Peter/Nightingale in later chapters, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 17:27:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2118501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotheksbewohnerin/pseuds/Bibliotheksbewohnerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Peter goes to investigate a ghost he gets abducted and wakes up in a strange room to find himself the test subject of the Faceless Man, who seems to search for a new way to harvest magic. Why Peter? And will Nightingale pick up the trail in time to get medical help to his apprentice?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Should They Know Their Fate

I had been hoping to avoid this kind of situation: Being trapped in a tight spot where I had no means of escaping other than through the help of others. Of course that wasn't an unusual case in policing, but usual policing didn't involve the supernatural. And this wasn't an operation that had gone wrong, it felt more like I'd all brought this upon myself. If only I'd been a little more careful. So all I could cling on to in this moment was the hope that Nightingale would figure something out. Figure out where I was. With whom I was.

One might think that it would be no problem for a wizard to escape from a room or a prison, but not if the abductor in question too is a wizard. I had not seen his face when I was captured, which meant that I knew precisely who he was. Fuck me, I thought, this was just typical. Of course I had to fuck up and get myself kidnapped.  
At first I had been kind of happy to see him, which does seem really stupid in the aftermath, but I couldn't help but cling to that little bit of hope that I had locked somewhere in my mind ever since the events at Skygarden: That Lesley had been under a glamour; that it was all a big mistake; that it all would be well. And even if that wasn't the case, I would still have felt some kind of relief from seeing her again. Seeing her face again. I had a lot of time to ponder about things at my hand. I had come to the conclusion that even though I still felt a burning rage when I thought about her, it would pain me just as much to know that something happened to her. The times we had could not be erased by recent events, no matter how much they broke my heart.

So here I was, trapped in a small cinder-blocked basement room, usually sitting on the floor since the “mattress” was already giving me enough backpains when I slept. When I tried to sleep. Sometimes, the artificial light provided by a neon tube on the ceiling was switched off for a few hours, though I wasn't entirely sure it was during night-time. The intervals were pretty irregular, but that's usually when I slept. Sometimes I just fell asleep on the floor from exhaustion.

Things would have been a lot less complicated had I been able to use magic. Not only might it have given me a way out, but I also would have had something to do other than ponder over my pathetic existence. Which I was very much doing now. But somehow, that cunning bastard had managed to make it impossible to use magic in these rooms. I had no idea how he'd done it. It would be the first thing I wanted to ask Nightingale when I'd see him.  
There were other interruptions though: food, being permitted to use what doesn't really qualify as a bathroom (which was another door in this room, but he only unlocked it a few times a day, he was probably worried I'd drown myself in the toilet before he was finished with me), and experimentation. It really fucking was like in a bad movie. The only thing missing was the guards speaking some foreign language. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed that there were, in fact, no guards at all. The only one I ever saw was the Faceless Man.  
There was one room were you could do magic; it was the room he did his experiments in. But I was under the influence of whatever forma it was when I was brought to that room that it became impossible for my brain to even remember who I was. There was some memory of the experiments themselves though, which led me to conclude that his main goal was to find a way to harvest magic from a practitioner. At least that's what I gathered from the few scraps of memory. From a scientific point of view I found that very interesting: I never did get to see if Skygarden truly worked. And trying to harvest magic from magic life seemed like the next step. Though I wondered why he hadn't chosen a truly magical being for that purpose: a faery, one of the Quiet People, a river maybe? Either the thought hadn't occurred to him, or they were, and I could imagine that especially with the rivers, simply too powerful for him. That thought kind of made me laugh. Mama Thames simply making this bastard jump off a bridge. I laughed out loud. My laughter echoed back to me a dozen times in this confined space of a quadratic room, and I couldn't help but think that I now truly felt like I was going mad. Or maybe I already had. I was aware that the irregular intervals of the light being switched on and off was an interrogation/torture technique popular in for example the GDR when it still existed. It drove the prisoners crazy to the point where they would confess any crime presented to them.  
At least I hadn't hallucinated Father Thames yet.

I wasn't exactly sure how long I had been kept here, but I had the vague notion that it was about a week. It may have been less. The first minutes after waking up I had spent desperately trying to do magic, failing, and then moving on to more violent methods such as shaking door. Which was how I came to realise that I had been cut open and that there were fresh wounds on my chest that had been sewn together not very professionally. It even felt as if...that bastard had inserted something. I wasn't sure, though. What I was sure about was that any kind of physical activity made them hurt like a motherfucker.  
I spent some time trying to figure out where I was in the first few days, or was it hours, but since I'd been knocked unconscious and woken up in this room, I didn't have much to go on. The building had to be quite new, either about ten years old, or built in the 80s or 90s and give a splash of fresh white paint. Either way it reminded me of American schools. Which didn't make the whole situation any better. And who knew, I wasn't sure that I was still in London, let alone England.

The Faceless Man had known exactly how to get to me. Probably because of Lesley. He'd somehow tricked Abigail into seeing a ghost, a bit different from last time, but not different enough to call in Nightingale. And I was grateful for the distraction, I really was. As big as the Folly was, the walls seemed to regularly close in on me. I sometimes couldn't bare sitting at that big table alone with Nightingale again, though I tried my best to hide it. I knew of the pain Nightingale had endured in his long life and I didn't want to mock him by showing weakness. I think he knew anyway though, my practice and Latin schedule was more packed than it had ever been, and I was pretty sure that my Master was masking concern behind a façade of rigour. Which wasn't very comforting. I could imagine that it was hard for him, too, losing his apprentice to evil, to not know what he'd done wrong. It must have been bad enough not having been able to help her when she'd lost her face. And now I was stuck here. Maybe Nightingale thought I'd turned, too? I knew he wasn't exactly the most emotional man in the world, but that probably just meant that his emotions ran too deep to reach the surface.  
Anyways, Abigail had met me in a small Park in Staines, where she'd spent time with friend and discovered the ghost. When I'd gotten to the spot, I had a few seconds to feel a wave of vestigium roll over me. I had barely registered who's signare this was and screamed “Abigail, run!” when everything went black around me. I still haven't got the faintest idea how he'd done it. Another question to ask Nightingale.

I could feel the heat coming back. It was slowly travelling up my spine, until it reached the back of my head. I don't know what was causing it, whether it was from exhaustion, some weird forma the Faceless Man had used, whatever surgery he'd done, or a mix of all three. My mind was scratching itself raw and racing at an uncontrollable pace and there was nothing I could do about it. The Faceless Man must have managed to do something with his experiments. I didn't know what, but I knew that I soon wouldn't be able to form a clear thought. Last time it happened I seemed to have managed to bite myself in the arms for whatever reason, the marks were still hot and red. Hopefully not infected. Somehow that seemed to be the least of my problems. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the impact.

**Author's Note:**

> I sincerely apologise for posting this almost a week late! There have been some complications and I ended up having to write something new. I haven't written fanfiction in a really long time so I'd really appreciate some constructive criticism! Beta-read by meinesuppenschuessel, thank you very much!


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